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Foundation and Gerin the Fox
Topic Started: Jun 4 2008, 12:36 PM (175 Views)
SladeJack
The Grand SladeJack
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Mak, I remember your describing the parallels between the two in detail on the Crappy Board last summer. That's a big part of what drew my interest to the series. But having finished Foundation and started F&E, I have to say I'm seeing only the vaguest, broadest similarities.

The Foundation is the brainchild of a genius who sees the fall of the Empire coming and plans out the history of a certain community, then arranges to have them sent to the fringes of the Empire, where they eventually get cut off from the Emperor by a general breakdown in communications and the rebellion of administrative subunits between the imperial center and the settlement.

Gerin's kingdom is a thoroughly ordinary fiefdom of a feudal empire that happens to get cut off from the Emperor when he quite abruptly and deliberately seperates the empire from the province of which it is a part in response to a threat from even further away. Their history unfolds as spontaneously as anyone else's, though they do enjoy the benefits of the favor of several gods and, more importantly, an above-average leader. The Foundation also has above-average leaders but they're irrelevant; to Gerin's kingdom, he's all-important.

Both the Foundation and Gerin's fiefdom/principality/kingdom gradually accrue regional hegemony. The Foundation manages this because it has preserved a technological advantage over everyone else, including the Empire itself, and uses its lost technology to render other, stronger worlds' economies dependent upon it. It manages to avoid wars with its barbarian neighbors--every one of them a onetime Imperial vassal who went off the reservation when communications brokedown--through, first, a religion which it created ex nihilo (and which takes hold in the societies to which it is introduced at a rather incredibly fast rate, especially for a story which deals with tens of millennia) and later through economic warfare.

Gerin establishes his hegemony over other off-the-reservation imperial vassals through the use of warfare. And the big wars he fights are against the Trokmoi, the Gradi, and a band of subhumans thought to be descended from kinky werewolves. The one time he's getting ready to fight a fellow ex-imperial, the war is called off when the Empire returns and they fight against it side-by-side. I've only just begun "The General" story so I can't compare Fox and Empire to it. But it seems like Gerin and Aragis are more like what the kings of Anacreon and Smyrno would have become had they not had a neighbor which was custim-built to dominate them both, than the Foundation and . . . whatever.

Gerin has no economic advantages over anyone else, and despite his being favored by Biton and eventually not hated by Mavrix, and having a demigod as a citizen of his kingdom (albeit a thoroughly unmanageable one) he gains no spiritual authority, not counting having an ex-sybil as his queen. Speaking of which, I get that Biton is Seldon's posthumous messages, but they're given before each crisis is resolved, not after, and come up ad hoc, not in a pre-planned position. Gerin isn't trying to preserve and expand upon knowledge that everyone else including the Empire has lost, he's trying to keep from losing knowledge that the Empire still retains in full but can no longer communicate to its province. He tries his best to maintain the Elabon Way and concedes that it's still deteriorating; Mallow shows an Imperial technician a piece of Foundation technology and the tech can't fathom how there could be such a drastic improvement over what he's used to.

The only giveaway that the one was based on the other is the title Fox and Empire. Past that, the resemblances are horribly superficial: communities on the edges of a once-great empire, cut off from the imperial center, trying to keep the light of civilization aglow as they struggle to hold off a series of enemies representing the forces of barbarism. And even that is problematic. For one thing, Foundation is the universe's only hope of not losing all knowledge, while Gerin is only trying to preserve civilization for his neck of the woods, and by the end of the series the defeat of the Elabonians actually works against that aim because if the Northlands were reintegrated into the Empire they'd be more thoroughly civilized than they would even if Gerin defeated Aragis and ruled the entire region. For another, even more important, Gerin actually has to fight and try to navigate a path to victory; until the entrance of the Mule, an event with no Elabonian parallel, Foundation can bank on the fact that every crisis will be resolved in their favor no matter what happens.

It's especially surprising that HT, whose parallelism is usually so painfully close to its source, is so far off here.
When you wipe your ass, make sure you wipe it really well.
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Makkabee
Count
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The Foundation doesn't just preserve ancient knowledge and technology, though that's their advantage in the very begining -- they also develop new tech, especially in terms of miniaturization -- the personal shield Salvor Hardin has in the confrontation with Anacreon is a technology never developed within the empire, just as the stirrups that Gerrin's troops use are an entirely new development.

The ad hoc nature of Gerrin's rise to power is different than the predestined, or at least prearranged, rise of the Foundation, but the steps the two take to get where they're going are still very similar. Both view themselves as the one thing standing between their region of a collapsing empire and barbarism. The Foundation exists to shorten the barbarian interregnum from 30,000 to 1,000 years. Gerrin talks about how if he loses the only difference between his descendants and those of the Trokme invaders will be that some have black mustachioes and some have red. Asimov's looking at the dead hand of history guiding things while Turtledove's telling a great-man heroic epic, but it seems to me that's the biggest difference, with the centuries of the Foundation story getting condensed into a single generation in the Fox books being an outgrowth of that, and the fantasy vs. sci fi settings being more window dressing than forcing differences in the development of the plot in a lot of places (though not in others, as with the werewolf attack).

HT doesn't follow Asimov's story as slavishly as he sometimes follows real history in his alternate history novels or Videssos books -- of course, history can't sue for plagiarism and the Asimov estate can. Nevertheless the parallels struck me forcefully enough that I thought of the Fox books as a tribute to the Asimov series even before reading Fox and Empire (which as you say does clinch it even if you were doubtful before).
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SladeJack
The Grand SladeJack
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I'd forgotten about the stirrups allowing the innovation of cavalry riders, though I did remember the riders. Other than that, though, all you've really got are two communities that place a priority on protecting advancement in a degenerate region with a little help from a far-seeing entity. That and in both cases the series of crises leading up to the attempted imperial reconquest are rather repetitive.
When you wipe your ass, make sure you wipe it really well.
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